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Everything I disliked about the cheesy villain and Kirito's plot enforced success was flipped 180 for me as when I realized the whole point of this arc was to present Kirito with a ethical choice with consequences in RL. I still think ALO was generally quite weak compared to SAO, but this ep at least made me respect what the story was trying to do. Even though I just couldn't get into ALO and found most of the 'drama' cringe worthy, Kirito's temptation and mercy scene came off very powerfully.

From my perspective, that scene was actually the only scene that mattered in the entire ALO arc, although to a certain extent the rest were necessary to set it up.

After the absolutely laughable first confrontation, they might as well not have bothered though. This would've worked after the fight against Kayaba or someone like him, but that joker Sugou?
In the light of that abomination of a fight, the RL confrontation just seemed to drag out an already dumb final confrontation... had last episode at least been done well, the RL confrontation would've had much more of the desired effect.

So yeah, I get what you're saying but surely ALO can't be considered anything but a complete failure of a story arc... I'm not even sure whether they want me to root for Asuna or Sugu anymore. Or why we are in a position of having to root for either at all.
BUT, I agree that presenting Kirito with a RL situation like this was important. I just wish it had been done in a better way. No one needs an entire arc full of awful to make that point.

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I gotta be honest: I thought .hack was a terrible show of its kind. I have to wonder if the writers had ever even looked at an MMO. It certainly succeeds in telling its own story, but as a story about gamers or games it fails on all levels.

.hack was released about a decade ago, at a time when MMOs were comparatively new. Both are about potential future VRMMOs but SAO was made today. Making a prediction as to what these would be like is much different and easier based on today's technologically improved MMOs than it was a decade ago, so I don't fault the former for that. Anyways, does that really matter? Since when was anime about realism?
As such, I was talking about the story told (which is what matters, imo), not game mechanics. Where .hack was pleasantly plot-driven, SAO decided to go down some strange harem/romance route, which I didn't expect or enjoy. SAO had potential...but wasted it carelessly on fanservice and girly romance.

You could say that I went into this show with the wrong expectations though.

.hack was released about a decade ago, at a time when MMOs were comparatively new. Both are about potential future VRMMOs but SAO was made today. Making a prediction as to what these would be like is much different and easier based on today's technologically improved MMOs than it was a decade ago, so I don't fault the former for that. Anyways, does that really matter? Since when was anime about realism?
As such, I was talking about the story told (which is what matters, imo), not game mechanics. Where .hack was pleasantly plot-driven, SAO decided to go down some strange harem/romance route, which I didn't expect or enjoy. SAO had potential...but wasted it carelessly on fanservice and girly romance.

You could say that I went into this show with the wrong expectations though.

If we're talking realism then I could hardly be expected to defend SAO, could I? I mean, we are talking harems and fanservice. But just going back the basic notion of being stuck in a game, I felt like SAO was written from a gamer's perspective on the matter while .hack treated it more like... I'm not entirely sure, but the fact that you could take the game part out entirely and still have most of the story make sense sends me a warning flag.

well, the subject of the different .hack parts never was the MMORPG in the first place : it was only the background. They talked about the world in general ( I mean the real world, not the game) and about the dependency of our society to the networks.

Idk. Probably around 2013. But like I said before, be sure to keep up with the official SAO site or any other anime news site. Since the light novel is still going on they should be able to make another season. Plus everyone loves SAO, it was also very popular.

On what basis are you making that comparison? In terms of both ratings and sales, Gundam AGE was not generally seen as particularly successful. Not that saying SAO is the most popular of the year is particularly objective either, but I'm a bit unsure why you'd use that example as the one that trumps it. Perhaps I might have compared with Fate/Zero?

In the light novels it was mentioned when Kirito went there that it was a specialized facility that didn't take emergency cases. So no ER, no heavy traffic in and out at night or heavy activity at night.

The anime skipped the part after the fight where he went to the receptionist desk and got the attention of a couple of nurses, who asked him "What happened to you!?" To which Kirito answered he'd been attacked by a man with a knife in the parking lot and he'd left the man unconscious. At which point the nurses summoned a guard, and one of the nurses and the guard went out to the parking lot looking for Sugou, the other nurse identified Kirito as a "family member" of Asuna and went to get a doctor for him. Once unattended, Kirito went to Asuna's room.